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Chris Harris

I received my bachelor and master’s degrees in psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 2016, I started my PhD in a collaboration between the Goallab and CRISP, the social psychology group under Prof. Klaus Fiedler. In 2017, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) granted me a one-year scholarship to support my research with the Goallab in Utrecht. My promoters are Dr. Ruud Custers and Prof. Klaus Fiedler. I am interested in human (pseudo-) contingency learning and especially in when and why humans err in their judgements and inferences thereof. My research is aimed at explaining how erroneous action-outcome representations are formed and upheld as people test the validity of their beliefs and is of importance whenever humans need to assess or predict contingencies, such as during sampling or decision making. To this end, I combine research from the fields of Pseudocontingencies and Action-Outcomes, two literatures that have so far developed largely independently from each other. Applications of my research could include such topics as superstitions or questionable beliefs regarding the effectiveness of medical treatments.